There is a lot of generally invisible work of leaders. That can be hard to distinguish from "not doing anything at all" in the moment, but across a year or more, the leaders who carefully build teams, work with the engineering leads to set appropriate goals and scope for projects, make sure that critical roadblocks are removed, ensure that engineers feel engaged with the work and company goals will succeed beyond that of those are literally doing nothing. To the junior engineers in the org, it may not appear any different and one leader just seems to keep getting lucky (appearing to just be dealt a series of good teams, good projects, consistently getting good outcomes, etc).